Six months before Hurricane Maria wreaked havoc in the Caribbean, a group of Puerto Rican artists were invited to participate in a residency program in Miami by local art organizations. The artists were offered abandoned storefronts-turned-studios at a historic downtown mall, where they’d exhibit their work during Miami Art Week in December to engage an art world that often overlooks the island territory.
Petr Pavlensky, a Russian performance artist, sent a nail through his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square in Moscow (on a holiday in celebration of law enforcement). He was later charged with hooliganism.
Pavlensky, as quoted in the Guardian: "The performance can be seen as a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of contemporary Russian society."
In May of 1977, artist Suzanne Lacy mapped every reported rape in LA for a period of three weeks. This project, aptly named "Three Weeks in May", was part of an extended performance which Lacy utilized as a means to expose LA's problem of violence against women. As a centerpiece for this project, Lacy used a large map where she recorded every reported rape in the area with the word RAPE.
The protagonism of the body in the dramatization of marginalized groups is also central to Emilio García Wehbi's Proyecto Filoctetes, an urban intervention staged November 15, 2002, on the streets of Buenos Aires. The project consisted in placing twenty-five lifelike latex mannequins in central, highly trafficked locations around the city in varying positions of injury, physical distress, and abandonment.
A This flash mob was designed to deliver a message to raise awareness and deepen understanding about the immediacy of the climate change problem. By subverting the lyrics of the Rattlin’ Bog, we appealed through music to the hearts of participants.
The Irish song, the Rattlin’ Bog, is a well-loved traditional cumulative song, with a short chorus, and is easily learned. The word Rattlin’ means ‘splendid’.
The work of a radical theater and puppetry collective, known as Papel Machete, produces and performs throughout Puerto Rico and the United States. Papel Machete was established on May 1, 2006 during protests responding to the government shutdown and political and economic crisis prompted by Puerto Rico’s status as a United States colony.
Four prominent Australian artists – Aretha Brown, Claire Martin, Kaff-eine and Jane Gillings – will gather in Canberra this Sunday, to discuss their art, activism and ideas, marking the closing weekend of Kambri’s HERE I AM festival.
The Art Activism by Great Women Conference is a day-long event, involving artist talks, Q&A sessions, panel discussions, afternoon tea, wine tasting and networking.
A performance art piece by a student who sat in a cage to protest a draconian lockdown of the Beijing Film Academy (BFA) recently went viral, and was censored just as quickly. Like many other Chinese citizens, university students have been living under strict lockdowns, and are beginning to chafe at the restrictions—and at administrators’ lack of responsiveness to students’ concerns.
‘Since Plotinus’, writes Joseph Tanke (2019, p. 486), ‘Western art has been consecrated to beauty, and beautiful art has been understood as the achievement of good form’. But alongside this interest in beauty and form, art has been committed to politics and perspectives, equity and rights. Consequently, and particularly since the start of the modern era, artists frequently initiate or participate in ‘difficult conversations’.
A small group of gay rights activists gathered outside the Russian Embassy in Beijing on Valentine’s Day to protest Russia’s antigay laws.
Behind a rainbow banner that read “To Russia with Love,” a dozen activists cheered as three couples puckered up and kissed in front of a countdown clock for the Sochi Winter Olympics outside the embassy’s tall walls.
Tamms Year Ten is an all-volunteer grassroots coalition of artists, prisoners, men formerly incarcerated in Tamms, family members and other people of conscience. In 2008, at the ten-year anniversary of the opening of the Tamms supermax prison, the group launched a legislative campaign to call for its reform or closure. Men were originally supposed to be there for one year—but at that point 1/3 of them had been in solitary confinement the entire decade.
When dancer Sheen Jamaal saw a video of protestors doing the Cupid Shuffle in New Jersey, inspiration struck to do something similar in New York. He immediately called his friend and collaborator Allison “Buttons” Bedell, and the seed for the Dance For George protest was planted.
In the south-western city of Chengdu, by all accounts a city on the edge coping with heavy pollution but also with authorities scrambling to put a lid on simmering discontent. That night police detained a number of artists who managed to stage a silent demonstration, while wearing face masks.
El Estudiante Militante is a giant puppet built by the members of Papel Machete and students of the University of Puerto Rico during the first three days of the 2010 student strike at a cultural camp established by the theater group in solidarity with the striking students. The puppet was built with materials inside the campus of the University.
Shu Yong is an artist who has been passionate about environmental protection in recent years. "The Earth Is Bleeding" was created in 1998. The creation was carried out in a studio of more than ten square meters.
Theater as investigative reporting or investigative reporting as theater, however you cut it, Mark Thomas, a British TV actor/comedian and activist has created a fascinating show. It's by him and about him: how he ran stings that put some illegal arms traffickers out of business or in jail and how he was deceived and betrayed by a "comrade" who turned out to be a spy for BAE Systems, the UK's largest aerospace and weapons company.
Our City is a startup nonprofit based in Oakland and working with cities everywhere. They work with governments, cultural institutions, companies, community organizations, designers, and residents to produce
events, installations, and workshops that use public design to improve cities.
In the broad context of the modern world of art, the work of Beili Liu has always seemed extraordinary in visual terms and deeply profound in thematic development. Born in China and living in the United States, much of her work usually circles themes tightly interwoven with notions of identity, culture, and time.
WOW started as an international women's theatre festival in October of 1980 in NYC. Within 18 months Wow found a permanent location and produced works by women and trans people all year around. In 1984 it moved into its current home at 59-61 East 4th Street.
In 2016, the Guggenheim Museum commissioned its very first robotic artwork called Can’t Help Myself (Wannmann, 2016). The artwork is created by two of China’s most controversial artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu and can be described as a robotic arm that has one specific, life-long duty: to prevent the deep-red, bloodlike liquid, which constantly oozes outwards, from straying too far (Weng, n.d.).
On Sunday April 3rd, Art Not Oil coalition member group BP or not BP? occupied the Great Court of the BP-sponsored British Museum with a 'disobedient exhibition'. Called 'A History of BP in 10 Objects', the exhibition featured artifacts submitted by frontline communities around the world who are fighting back against the impacts of BP's operations.
CAIRO — Seven Egyptians were arrested on charges of promoting homosexuality after concertgoers waved rainbow-colored flags at a rock concert in Cairo last week, Egyptian officials said.
The arrests were the latest assault on social freedoms in Egypt under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, whose government has imposed harsh restrictions on free speech and led an aggressive campaign against gays.
The group known as Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli, which practices Mexican Nahua dance, song and drumming, is a frequent presence at Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Its dancers first took to the streets in solidarity with the movement after the death of Jamar Clark, who was shot and killed by Minneapolis police in 2015.
A set of strategies to highlight the high cost of medicine and lack of transparency in the pharmaceutical industry including a funny and disturbing satirical website, video, and press conference to promote their fake organization, the Association of Honest Pharmaceutical Representatives.